We love the apps that developers make for the Mac, but it’s easy to forget about the apps that help developers make the apps. From code editors to icon designers to documentation and snippet repositories, there’s a ton of different apps that developers rely on to help them make the best Mac apps they can. This week, we’ve got an exclusive interview with a developer who’s apps are expressly designed to help Mac developers.

Vadim Shpakovski is the creator of CodeBox, the wonderful snippet-storing application for OS X that we liked when we reviewed it last year. He’s also made ResolutionTab, PNG Compressor, and Hunting, all tools aimed at helping developers on the Mac platform, and released a decent amount of open source work at his own site. We thought it would be interesting to talk to Valdim about his work, and he kindly agreed to answer some questions about OS X and what it means to be a designer of top-notch OS X applications.

If you live in your calendar, chances are you’ll want more than the built-in Calendar app offers. Calendar in OS X isn’t bad, per se, but it’s definitely not as powerful or productivity-focused as many wish.

As many people are aware, BusyCal is a very commendable iCal replacement. Since the release of BusyCal 2, though, it’s fair to make the bold statement that BusyCal is an exceedingly commendable iCal (or, as with OS X 10.8, Calendar) replacement. It has the potential to make you more productive and efficient with the addition of some very well received and welcomed features. Let’s take a look. (more…)

Almost everyone loves going on trips and getaways. Whether it’s for business or for pleasure, it’s nice to experience new places. Whilst it can be remarkable seeing different cultures and experiencing different ways of life, it can be daunting and overwhelming just trying to plan your trip.

YourtTrip aims to simplify the process of preparing for a trip and aims to help you plan out where you’re going, what you’re going to pack, budgets and also helps you make an itinerary. Let’s take a look. (more…)

Your iTunes library can turn into an unsightly mess far quicker than most of us would like to admit. By the time you’ve ripped CD collections, purchased albums, and dragged in the random online mp3 download, odds are you’ve got a lot of music with missing cover art, artist info, and more.

Tunes Cleaner aims to make sorting and tidying your iTunes library easy and painless, along with helping you reorganize and repair your music using its ‘powerful online database’. Is it what you’ve been needing to keep your iTunes library tidy? Let’s dive in and see.

Making an icon can be a tedious task in itself. Just designing a high-quality icon can be hard enough, but then you’ll still have to export it in all the sizes needed and make sure you don’t miss anything.

Icon Slate is an app designed to take the hassle out of a tedious task and makes the task of creating and exporting icons much more easier. With Icon Slate, you don’t have to worry about all the problems that can occur when you’re manually resizing, scaling and exporting your icons as the app really does make it all very simple.(more…)

Developers build all the cool tools we use to stay productive and entertained on our Mac and other devices, but it turns out, they need good tools themselves. One of the reasons Macs make such great development platforms are all the great development apps in the App Store and ready for download directly from around the net.

Here’s 30 of the best tools for developers, some of which you might already be using and others you might have just have heard of in passing. Even if you’re not a developer, be sure to give the roundup a look, as there’s a lot of productivity apps in here that just might appeal to you too!

Typing has become as essential to life as writing and reading. It’d be impossible to use most tech products today without any typing skills, and if you use computers for any extended period, you’d better be fast while typing or you’ll quickly get left behind. Accuracy and speed are still crucial skills, even with AutoCorrect and speech detection built into OS X today.

Keys is an app that aims to get you typing faster than ever and to help you improve the accuracy of your typing. The average person can type around 50-70 words per minute, but with Key, you’ll hopefully be typing like the pros at 150 words per minute in no time. It might be the perfect app for back-to-school season, getting you ready to type up essays, or for any of us IT pros that want to speed up our typing. Let’s take a look and see if this is the app you need to make your typing more efficient on the world’s best OS for writing. (more…)

When it comes to sharing code snippets with others, there aren’t really many services that do it justice. Many lack syntax highlighting, and don’t even have desktop clients to make the experience of uploading a snippet pleasant. There’s plenty of ways to share code, but few that check all the boxes for a perfect Mac-to-web code snippet sharing experience.

SourceBox is an app that allows you to easily upload snippets of code and other text to PasteBin, as well as their own SourceDrop service and other popular sites for sharing code snippets online. If you find yourself often needing to share bits of code, this just might be the app you’ve been looking for. (more…)

A snippet, in terms of coding, is a small piece of code that you can use over and over again in various projects. So as a developer (or designer for that matter), it’s useful to have your snippets readily available while you’re working on your next big project.

This is where CodeBox comes into play. CodeBox is a snippet management tool that allows you to quickly access, add and make modifications to your snippets with ease.

If you create apps in addition to using them, then you know that it can be a real pain to optimize your artwork for various devices. Prepo is a free application that aims to make the task of converting retina display artwork to ‘normal’ app artwork less tedious.

Does it succeed in making the conversion process quick and pain free? Read on to find out.